Simeon Krechkov

Holy Hieromartyr Simeon Krechkov was a deacon of the church of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God in the village of Bykovo near Moscow, and he was shot at Butovo on 16 November 1937, together with two priests of the same church.

In the time of persecution it happened that militant atheists arrested not only the priest but the whole clergy and the most active laymen, as took place in the village of Bykovo, Ramenskoe district. There were arrested the priests John Kesariysky and Peter Kosminkov, the deacon Simeon Krechkov, the church warden Evdokia Safronova and the members of the church council Peter Piskarev-⁠Molokov, Alexander, Catherine and Dimitri Chilikin, between 1 and 3 November 1937, and they were imprisoned at Taganka.

Simeon was born in 1876 in the village of Ponizovye, Vereya district, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Nicholas Krechkov. He attended the Perervinsky school and the Moscow Seminary, graduating in 1900, was first a teacher, and in 1903 was ordained deacon for the church of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God in Bykovo, where he served until his arrest in 1937. At his interrogation he answered that he had carried out no counter-⁠revolutionary activity, belonged to no counter-⁠revolutionary group and knew nothing of it, of its illegal meetings or of its organizers, and he refused to slander himself or others. On 15 November 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced the priests John Kesariysky and Peter Kosminkov and the deacon Simeon Krechkov to death, and on 16 November they were shot and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo. The other arrested received years in camps: Alexander and Dimitri Chilikin ten years, Peter Piskarev-⁠Molokov, Evdokia Safronova and Catherine Chilikina eight years; Evdokia Safronova and Peter Piskarev-⁠Molokov died in detention in 1938.

He is commemorated on 25 November and, in the new style, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.